Welcome to 4.3.

[Aaron J. Seigo]

Hello everyone.

So we booked the hotel in Porto over the weekend for Tokamak II. No turning 
back now! The Big Topics will all turn around what we doing for 4.3 and 
beyond. So now is a good time to start thinking about that .. why?

Because, if you somehow managed to miss the news, 4.2 RC1 was tagged and a 4.2 
branch made. That means trunk is now open for 4.3.

First, I'd like to both thank and congratulate everyone who contributed to 
Plasma in KDE 4.2. It is a quantum jump up from 4.1 and the sky is the limit 
from here. We managed to get a huge number of goals set out right at the 
beginning of Plasma completed, things like extenders and unified reporting of 
events.

libplasma made it into kdelibs, and the Plasma desktop shell looks better than 
anything the KDE project has *ever* released.

Right now, we hae 196 outstanding defect reports on bugs.kde.org, beating our 
goal of 200 by 4. This was a long, hard battle down from 450 through 2 betas 
and a metric tonne (or three) of new lines of code.

It has been an awesome dev cycle. Each of us should be very proud and 
satisfied with what we've done with the last 6 months.

Thank you all, for that.

With the release coming out, we'll probably face a bunch of new bug reports 
and when we close bugs we should backport them. The svnbackport script in 
kdesdk makes this easy to do.

Also remember that libplasma must now maintain binary compatibility. More than 
anything else in libplasma, I'll be watching all commits that touch headers to 
ensure that we stay on track. I'd appreciate it if you watched as well. 
Cookies for anyone who catches me screwing up. ;)

But the real fun, of course, is 4.3. What are we going to work on? What will 
we do?

Well, there's obviously stuff in 4.2 that can use polishing and work and 
there's always the enjoyable business of making things prettier and faster.

I would personally like to see us concentrate in 4.3 on *making things* with 
the framework we have errected here. We've spent the last year on a kick ass 
framework, let's spend 2009 blowing people's minds with what you can build 
with it.

For 4.3 I'm going to focus on community, sociability and media.

No, I'm not focussing on things other than Plasma! I mean I want to focus on 
making Plasma something that keeps you in touch with the KDE community and 
your own communities. Something that helps, rather than gets in the way, of 
you being social. Something that encourages the use of media more pervasively 
and more enjoyably.

For me, this means a number of projects I'll be starting:

* The Make A Widget Foundation (not sure if that's funny anywhere else but 
North America): make every myspacer able to make and share widgets!
	* The Plasma Design Studio; I've been working on design concepts since 
Akademy around this and have some, imo anyways, pretty decent ideas on how to 
do it
	* Improving the Basic JavaScript engine more and more
	* Implementing that security framework!

* Plasma Meets World: this is the JOLIE work that must finally make it into 
libplasma so that people can discover a new level of interoperability and 
power with their computers, and so Fabricio doesn't hang me by my toes ;)

* Media Center: This is the one I'm least sure about ... but ... something to 
discuss at Tokamak for sure.

of course, there are more mundane things i'll also be plonking on, like:

* bugfixing (*sigh*)
* adding generic layout strategy support to Containments (something that makes 
it possible to create and re-use layouts like the ones we've done for the 
desktop or the panel in new containments)
* context menu plugins
* further work on per-desktop views
* revisit the zooming system and refine, refine
* cashew-pops-up-dashboard?
* Plasma::Message for plasmoids to show messages in a generic but pretty 
fashion to the user, e.g. the folderview saying "can't reach the network"
* Plasma::Colors: rethinking colour schemes in plasma
* new applet browser window
* SolidDevice engine needs a Service

i'm not hellbent on being The One to do all of the above, of course ;) if 
you're interested, i'm happy to help or just hand it on over.

But definitely start putting on your thinking caps ... it's feature season 
again! Woo! 

Oh, and if you have a component that is ready to go in 4.3, you can start 
merging things into trunk.


... btw ... I think that if we just keep doing what we've been doing and keep 
having fun at it, we're going to BLOW MINDS with 4.3. =)

Hugs ... 

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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